The Role of a Patent Search
People come into our office and they present an invention and they say, this has never been done before. And then of course, we have to evaluate who they are and how well they know the industry and the products. So generally they’ve gone to the store, they’ve gone to Home Depot, they’ve looked on the internet. They’ve searched for it and they haven’t been able to find it and that’s fine because that’s a good way to begin.
But a professional patent searcher like we have in our office will use much different tools. For example, the searching system in the patent office is by class and subclass and sub-subclass.
Even though we search for the particular invention, even if we can’t find exactly that invention, knowing what other people have done help us to write the patent application, and particularly the claims. The claims are written in such a way as to get around what people have done before. And therefore, what we find is it actually streamlines the patent process.
It makes it shorter, makes it less expensive because there are less, there’s less give and take back and forth with the patent examiner after a search has been done.